Grad student creates working Portal turret for his final project

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A Penn State grad student has created a real-life working version of the infamous player-killing turrets from the hit game Portalas his final project for graduation. I would say that after watching the video, any professor that doesn’t give this guy a Masters degree needs to be the first target of this amazing creation.

Using an Arduino Uno and wiring to a bread board, the student who goes by the handle “kss5095” was able to achieve the motion and tracking using MATLAB, a programming environment used by robotics professionals to design algorithms for the operation of their creations. MATLAB allowed kss5095 to create a friend or foe differentiation for the turret based on the color of the shirt they are wearing, in this case anyone wearing a pink shirt is shot on sight, while others are just tracked.

Complete with the sound effects from the game asking people nicely to “come closer,” the turret is eerily accurate when it senses a foe nearby. There is even a laser sight connected to one of the USB cannons that are controlled by the laptop the whole contraption is hooked up to. As you can see from the image above, this is still a work in progress because the frame of the turret isn’t accurate to the model from the game, but I have a feeling that the man behind the whole thing will take care of that quite satisfactorily in the future.

Now to find out how to order four or five of these things to place around my house to nail my kids when they are misbehaving.